coolGuy2000, may I ask why is it so important for you to join in a research group or become a research assistant as early as your freshmen year at the undergrad level?
I ask because honestly don’t see any add-on benefit from doing that. If anything, I think that would be counter-productive to your development as a young, enthusiastic and curious college student trying to become a well-rounded person.
I would encourage you to use that time to know more of the university (as Berkeley is huge with many interesting places to explore), the environment, the people (meet more people from other colleges and join clubs) and other opportunities that you may acquire or take advantage of outside of your academics. There’s time for everything. Take it easy. Make college a fun and memorable time for you to cherish for the rest of your life.
I’d say that the advantage would come from challenging you to learn what you are interested in. If you are interested in taking the easy path, don’t even consider Berkeley. Cal, along side a handful of other schools, is considered prestigious for a reason.
This is off-subject, but I think it’s interesting because some posters here mentioned “famous professors” at UCB.
I gave my D a ride to UCB this morning. On the way she told me she had met two great figures at UCB:
Lotfi Zadeh (1921 - 2017), the father of "fuzzy logic." His research was once a candidate for the Golden Fleece award and later was a recipient of the Golden Goose award.
William Kahan (1933 - ), the principle architect of IEEE standard of floating point calculation. He still once in a while drops in the meetings of her group and offer advice to whoever cares to ask him.
I myself worked for two start-ups from researches under Prof. Robert Brayton, a pioneer in logic synthesis and formal verification. My company provides software to some of his researches, and I still see him once in a while.
No hiring manager is going to toss the resume of a Georgia Tech CS grad into the wastebasket in favor of a Berkeley EECS graduate. They’ll both get interviewed. The single advantage I can think of with Berkeley is that you’ll be immersed in the tech culture of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley region while going to school.
The fame of your professors while you’re an undergrad is irrelevant. What matters is whether they can teach or not, and famous professors are usually known for their research rather than their teaching skills. I once took a physics class from a professor who’s very well known in the physics community, and it was almost impossible to get access to him outside of the 10 minutes he hung around after class.
simba9, I guess he wasn’t Richard Feynman. Some great professors can give students much deeper understanding of the materials and intuitions well beyond the textbooks. People are what matter the most in any place. For colleges, they are the professors (and the students themselves).
This boils down to to the arguments contained in a “Prestige” thread of not so long ago. If a manager has two resumes, one from a Cal Student and one from a GT student (same major, same gpa), that manager is likely to toss neither in the bin. The more interesting question is what if he can only invite one to interview? When I ask myself that question I believe that the Cal resume would win out perhaps as much as 90%. IMO.
This is EECS not the entire engineering departments. 100% of Berkeley EECS are academically qualified to be at Stanford. In the cross admits of students that got into both Stanford and Berkeley, 90 go to Stanford, the 10 that go to UCB, go because of Berkley’s EECS.
A small company with a small recruiting budget within driving or public transit distance to either school will probably interview the nearby candidate first out of convenience, if they are otherwise similarly qualified. The same goes for on-campus recruiting.
@ucbalumnus Agree, but that evens out to the extent that the number of smaller companies in the vicinity are the same. The edge in this case may actually go to Cal thanks to silicon valley.
But for international students like me, the opportunities for working off-campus during the school year are pretty much irrelevant, right? We are not eligible to work off-campus while the school is in session.
@coolGuy2000 I thought there was some kind of visa or work permit for international students in the US that let them take temporary jobs during school and for a few months after graduation if the jobs were related to their field of study. Look under the section entitled “Employment” in the following link
I’ve never seen that situation. But in case it did happen, for a new graduate the manager would most likely look at the list of classes taken, and invite the candidate with the most relevant classes.
It was Leonard Susskind.
There’s actually some question as to how good of a teacher Feynman was. I would argue he’s mostly famous for his books. (I read his books, and his comments about how physics textbooks get chosen by schools were really funny. I remember him writing about how one of the better physics textbooks had this fantastic, wonderful description of green stars…except there were no such thing as green stars, The way he explained it was hilarious.) https://mathblog.com/was-richard-feynman-a-great-teacher/
@coolGuy2000 I’m a senior faced with this similar question. I’ve just finished reading this thread, let us know where you end up deciding to go. Good luck.
I think there are tight connections between GaTech, Carnegie Mellon and MIT, because so many GaTech professors attended MIT or Carnegie Mellon.
People on the west coast are probably not very familiar with GaTech, and just assume that Berkeley is better. I still believe GaTech is better for undergraduate education, because its got some innovative ways of teaching CS and its a lot smaller.
The CS curriculum at GaTech is different than Berkeley’s and the degree is different. Berkeley offers an EECS bachelors of science, that is a combination of EE and CS, or a bachelors of arts in CS. GaTech offers more types of specialization to CS undergraduates.
The technical Threads at GaTech allow CS students to choose two areas to specialize in,
and each CS student chooses two areas from this list- Devices, theory, intelligence, modeling and simulation, media and info internetworks. GaTech offers an internationally focused bachelors degree and a research oriented degree in CS as well.
